The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day

Today, for the first time in twenty-one years, my country isn't making veterans, at least not in any "official" foreign wars.

Oh, sure. Hundreds of GIs of one stripe or another are doing the nation's dirty business - some of it dangerous, as well - in various unpaved parts of the world for some nebulous "national interests" that your average Joe and Molly Lunchpail couldn't identify if they sat on their hands and thought about it for a fortnight.

But the "big wars" of the post-9/11, Post-Gulf-War 1 era?

Done.

And, look! 

Suddenly all that "support the troops" guff? 

It's disappeared like magic, melted like a fallen ice cream cone on a hot summer sidewalk. I didn't see a single Veterans Day ad, didn't hear so much as a whispered "thank you for your service" today. 

Those who gave their youth and strength in the wars their fellow citizens either helped gin up or were at least indifferent to those who ginned them up? 

As invisible as Marley's Ghost was to the suffering poor.

It is as it has always been; "Danger past and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted".

But that's fine. 

That's what happens after wars, if there is an "after" to the wars. The worst part about the "War on Terror" was there never was an "after". 

For years and years I wrote on this day of the seemingly endless trickle of maimed and dead that we brought home, unresolved, and the fields of maimed and dead (and widowed and orphaned and sown with ruin and merciless hatred) we left behind us abroad.

That was the most awful thing; that for years my nation learned nothing and yet forgot nothing, carelessly devouring its' own and others' children like the Titan Kronos.

Well. that's done. 

For now, anyway.

Mind you, I don't expect that my fellow citizens have learned anything from the dark and bloody tale of our Adventures in Politics By Other Means. The next time some irksome foreigner pokes us in the giggy I'm sure the Great American Public can be counted on to rise in righteous wrath, wrapped in the flag and roaring that gawdawful "God Bless The USA" song, demanding that someone - someone else, mind you - go smite the dusky foe.

But at least, for now, we're nominally at peace.

And I'll take that.

Because, as Herodotus wrote: "No man is so foolish as to desire war more than peace: for in peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons."

I wish you and all of yours a peaceful day full of small joys.

And to those of my brothers and sisters who also once wore the particolored clothes; 

Here's to us. Who's like us? Damn few, and they're all dead.

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

Frankly, I can't say it better than Jim Wright did, so instead of wasting your time blathering on about this, my forty-second Veteran's Day, I'm just going to hand you over to him.

I do want to emphasize Wright's point about the politically dangerous business of "heroing" soldiers in a notional democracy.

To lionize the military as we do, to exempt soldiers - because that's what "hero" does; it takes the object of that veneration out of the sordid business of daily living and makes them a shining object of veneration - from criticism and scrutiny is to make them the idols of your society. 

That's not "democracy". It is "militarism", the heart of totalitarian doctrines like fascism and soviet-style-communism.

Like Wright, I'm not vauntingly proud of what I did in the Army.

I did my time, and did it well. I had some good times, some bad time - though not as bad as the troops who had to fight real wars had - had a good laugh and came home sound.

Which is a damn "good war" all things considered.

I'm good with my past.

But I'm concerned for my and my children's future. So I want you to think - just as it made me think - about what Wright says about this day.

For as he has said elsewhere; if you want a better country, you have to be better citizens.

End of Time in Service in the Time of Trump

Today should be the last Veteran's Day of the Trump Era. We should be getting our exit physicals, making the rounds of the VA shop and the other ETS stations that GIs have to cycle through before hitting the street as civilians again. 

We should be the shortest of short-timers.

Instead we stand, appalled, as the gang of grifters, con-men, criminals, and wannabe fascist assholes try to steal an election like the caudillo's goons in some sort of third-rate banana republic and barely a voice is raised to tell them to sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and act like citizens in a democratic republic that is also the global super power.

Four years ago on this day I was furious:

"A large minority of my fellow citizens has chosen to put over me as my nation's Chief Executive a man that I would have done my best to chapter out of my Army had he come through my training unit when I was under the hat; a compulsive liar, a man who shirked his own service then boasted that prancing around in some sort of silly military school uniform was "just like serving", a bully and a con man and a thief.

This man, and his party, will over the next four years attempt to destroy the America I grew up in. They will attempt to reverse, repeal, and destroy the liberal and progressive and egalitarian and regulatory acts that have changed the face of this nation since 1929."

If anything that man and that party have turned out to be worse than I ever imagined. They were all that AND the First World equivalent of a gang of thieves running a small-time con on some sorry dirt-road Third World shitshow of a country, and I don't know if that's more embarrassing or humiliating, or both.

But I know this; I didn't plan to spend twenty-two years as part of the Guardia Nacional for some tinpot banana dictator.

Nope.

I knew that war was a racket. I knew I was just another imperial legionary, pushing the empire's writ on those people in those places the empire wanted things.

The one thing I never pictured myself as, though, is some sort of shithole-country uniformed thug, like the gangsters in the Fuerza de Defensa I knew in Panama back in the Eighties.

And yet, here we are.

I hope everyone else who wore the tree suit or the crackerjacks or the flightsuit is as furious about this as I am. Like I said; I don't give a shit how much you love your God or your guns or your tax cuts. Some things transcend our petty preferences, and the Great Promise of the United States - equal justice under law - is one and the most important one of them.

What's going on now in this country makes a mockery and a hollow sham of every citizen's vote and every serviceperson's oath. It is a slap in the face of our promise to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

If stealing - or trying to steal - an election is not being an enemy of the Constitution, I don't know what is.

So spare me today the homilies about veterans and service, and instead go spend some time shouting at Republicans to STFU and be actual small-r republicans instead of fucking banana republicans.

Because there is nothing I can say or do today suits the times better than what I wrote the year after my 2016 rant. 

The current state of the nation makes a joke of the idea that it is currently capable of "honoring" anything or anyone. The best we can do is stand ashamed of what we are doing to the work of those who have served in - and especially out - of uniform to preserve the promise of this nation, so I will conclude now as I did then:

"For those of you who have come here seeking grave words hymning this day, weighted with honor and glory of the service I and mine have done and do, I have none."

 

The Eleventh Minute of the Eleventh Hour

I had an incandescent rant all ready to go for today, similar to the one I put up here last November 11th. I wrote it out. I looked at it, and I just couldn't find the heart to publish it.

What's the point?

You all know as well as I do what I was going to say. War is a racket. We - me, everyone I served with, the people serving now, the veterans of tomorrow and next week and next year - are just the bailiff's men, serving our country's liens in places and on people all over the world. No, we don't do sweet fuck all to "defend your freedoms". We kill people and break shit that our "leaders" have designated as inimical to our national interests. We're the button men and women for Donnie "Five-Deferment" Trump and his crew of racketeers just as we have been for every President and every Congress since 1945.

Now there's some honor and decency serving as an imperial legionary. Not all empires are pure Evil. But to pretend that we're still the Arsenal of Democracy of Remember Pearl Harbor? To tell ourselves that the people who wore the uniforms in the 1980's and 1990's and Oughts and now the Teens are somehow like the Greatest Generation that saw off Hitler and Tojo? That's just foolish, the self-deluding mumbling of an idiot child needing the comfort of a kindly lie.

I won't pretend that I didn't enjoy my Army days. I won't pretend that I'm not proud that I was a good soldier and then a good sergeant. When my days are done I'll gladly slope off for a pint in Hell with my old pals from Division, from my Reserve and Guard outfits, and maybe if we're lucky with the hard boys of the Legio X Fretensis, and the 3rd Company of the 1st Battalion of the Légion étrangère. Here's to us. Who's like us. Damn few, and they're all dead.

I know who I am, and what I did. I'm not ashamed of it, but I'm not vauntingly proud, either. I didn't hold Bastogne or Guadalcanal. I did the dirty work of geopolitics and I'm okay with that. I served with good people, had a laugh, and came home sound, and no legionary can ask more than that.

No, it is you, my friends, my fellow Americans, who need to look into your hearts and souls and ask why you have been happy to be lied to, gleeful to parrot the nonsense taught you about "freedom" and "fighting them there", eager to pretend that you have not sent, or been willing to let others send in your name, young men and women into harm's way for nothing more than a handful of dollars, or a passing bit of geopolitics, or some fancy of "national honor", or some fantasy about dangerous enemies, where there is nothing but ruin and impotent anger that our own nation has grown from the seeds of our own ignorant hate and fear while pretending to be the victims ourselves.

I just don't have the heart to rant about this. I am just tired, and a little grieved, for the foolish waste of it all.

On this day I offer only the cold comfort that our nation's ideals promise that We the People can choose to honor our veterans by choosing not to make more of them unless it's for a truly fucking good reason.

For those of you who have come here seeking grave words hymning this day, weighted with honor and glory of the service I and mine have done and do, I have none.

Service in the time of Trump

I never really feel anything but a mild irritation on this day. THIS today the irritation is less mild and is overlayered with a sort of sour contempt.

A large minority of my fellow citizens has chosen to put over me as my nation's Chief Executive a man that I would have done my best to chapter out of my Army had he come through my training unit when I was under the hat; a compulsive liar, a man who shirked his own service then boasted that prancing around in some sort of silly military school uniform was "just like serving", a bully and a con man and a thief.

This man, and his party, will over the next four years attempt to destroy the America I grew up in. They will attempt to reverse, repeal, and destroy the liberal and progressive and egalitarian and regulatory acts that have changed the face of this nation since 1929.

I've been Chief Executive-d by knaves and bastards before. I despised Dubya, had little but personal contempt for Bill Clinton and his wandering penis, thought Ronnie Reagan was a bloviating idiot. In a sense I tolerated them and the people who elected them because their elections owed more to We the People's ridiculous optimism and poor education and, sometimes, their venality and greed. They promised us "stuff" and we gave them power. That's how people are and that's how "leadership" has always been since the days of bread and circuses.

I'm not pissed off that my nation has elected this con man because he promised change in the form of doing the awful things to the sorts of people and things they hated, and people responded to that with unfounded optimism and poor education (and some venality, greed, a smidgen of racism and sexism and hate).

No, what irks the shit out of me is the fucking stupid of it. Bone-stupid. Thermonuclear stupid.

It was such a...cheap, obvious, lame-ass con. From the fucking idiotic Wall to the impossible promises of those millions of beautiful jobs it was a con so visible and so clearly ridiculous that only a real simpleton would have believed it. But millions of simpletons fucking did. I hate to think that so many of my fellow Americans are Just That Stupid that they'd buy a Gilded Age thinking they were getting a raise and a week's vacation at Sandals. But, apparently, they are.

Goddamn it but I wish I had their e-mail addresses so I could run one of those Nigerian oil-minister scams on them. I'd be a fucking millionaire.

I remain stubbornly proud of my service and the ideals of my country that led me to that service.

But of the country itself, its "leaders", and many of its people, I am today less proud than ever.

The guns below

Another year and the guns in central Asia, unheard by all but a tiny handful of citizens of the United States, have not fallen silent. There is no Armistice above the Durand Line, or in the many hidden places where American soldiers do their nation's bidding.

What more, what better can I say than what an earlier President of my country said some one hundred fifty years ago:

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Surely it is time and past time to "finish the work we are in", and to "honor" the veterans by bringing the Armistice and making no more of them.

Bringing women's soccer to Kabul can hardly be worth the cost in blood and treasure. For all the good that we may do there must be an end to our thankless task of hustling the East, while the task is borne by those we send to do what we choose not to do ourselves.

And for many of them only their death will see an end to war.

The Guns Fall Silent

Ninety-four years ago today the guns fell silent after four long years of relentless killing.

I've spoken about this before. I still believe that the U.S. has done this day a disservice.

There is certainly a time and place to render respect to those who have served a nation under arms - although I would further add that when those who have served have done so not to defend against genuine threats to the nation's safety but to advance national interests abroad the relationship changes - but that this day should be reserved for those who were subsumed in the abyss of death that was the Great War.

And the thought occurred to me this Remembrance Sunday; I find it rather sad that we "celebrate" this day with armed soldiers and military pomp.

Although the day is about men who served and died as soldiers, the men who died would very likely have wanted us to remember not the illusion of power and glory that led them to those deaths, but the reality of suffering and pain that were the chiaroscuro that often made those deaths a welcome release.

After nearly one hundred years it is hard to be sure, but I would bet that many of those dead men would rather have us lay down those weapons and approach their monuments in sorrow and regret that we will pick them up again.

Instead of pomp and the sword they might want us to bring to them a running lake, a flock of sheep, and one who sings her child to sleep.

But the reality is that the hell of Sulva Bay (and Verdun, and Passchendaele, and the Somme, and Chemin des Dames, and the Argonne, and Tannenberg, and the Isonzo, and Caporetto, and all the other nameless places where millions of young men suffered and died - and millions more women and children starved and bled and vomited their lives out from typhus and cholera and influenza) never touched this country.

So we don't really understand this day, and what it means to the nations that do and those of their sons and daughters that suffered.

Veteran's Day: Memorial Tablet

Squire nagged and bullied till I went to fight,
(Under Lord Derby's scheme). I died in hell -
(They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight,
And I was hobbling back; and then a shell
Burst slick upon the duck-boards; so I fell
Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light.At sermon-time, while Squire is in his pew,
He gives my gilded name a thoughtful stare;
For, though low down upon the list, I'm there;
"In proud and glorious memory" ... that's my due.
Two bleeding years I fought in France, for Squire:
I suffered anguish that he's never guessed.
Once I came home on leave: and then went west ...
What greater glory could a man desire?~S. Sassoon

An Brief Poem, for Armistice (i.e. Veterans) Day

"In time of dangeror in warGod and the soldier we adore.Danger past, andall things righted?God is forgottenand the soldier slighted."I seldom feel more than a slightly irked contempt for the "Support Our Troops" sort of warrior- and war-hugging that gets trotted out on days like today and the last weekend in May. But this one always seems somehow even more false, since the only real reason for it is to commemorate the end of the insanely stupid slaughter of WW1, which we in fact neither remember nor reverence.

As I tell anyone who "thanks" me for my service today; I didn't do it for you. Oh, and I'll take the bonus Congress promised me now, without a side of beatings and gas, thanks.

I remain stubbornly proud of my service and the ideals of my country that led me to that service.But of the country itself, its "leaders", and many of its people, I am no longer so sure.

Muffled drum

As I sat peacefully at my desk this morning, rolling soil worms and blogreading I came across this agonizing post over at Ranger Against War.

And it occured to me what I was trying to reach for in my preceding post about war and remembrance and soldiers and our nation.

And it was simply this; "One death is tragedy, a million deaths are statistics."

We are bundled into uniforms that make us look alike, we are herded into aircraft or onto ships in anonymous masses, we go to work, or fight, or die, in the faceless, nameless, mechanized machine that is modern war. We're even zipped into identical plastic bags and shipped home - or those bits of us that are left - in identical coffins, or wrapped in identical gowns that drape over the insulted bodies and the missing limbs or twisted guts.

But then we're on our own. Or to our families, our husbands or wives. To those who love us, or try to, as time and tide ravage what war left behind.

And it occurred to me that this day, and the days like it, are part of the problem instead of part of the solution.

We just perpetuate the anonymity, with our parades and uniformed marchers and wreaths at mute stone that covers a faceless "unknown" whose very facelessness distances his suffering from those of us still suffering. In our public mass mourning we celebrate as much as mourn.

So perhaps the...best...way to spend this day is beside someone; someone you know, someone you love, perhaps a stranger dying alone...who has been beaten with the iron rod of the God of War.

Or, perhaps even more important, someone whose life has been twisted by a war they were too young, or too old, to fight; a soldier's widow, a father who buried his son, a child too young to understand why daddy or mommy never came home. Among the cruellest victims of war are it's oldest, and youngest.

And to reflect that each one, every one, every single man or woman who has looked into this abyss is a tragedy. Not a statistic. And mourn them as you would they mourn you; for yourself, wounded unto death and going into the vasty Dark as we all do, alone.

And grieve.Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden

The guns below

I was watching Aston Villa's truly comical demolition of Bolton Wanderers last Saturday, when I noticed something odd about Villa's rather unpleasant "claret" (read: venous blood red) and sky-blue uniforms.

A small red rosette-thing on the front of the shirt.

I had noticed something similar on the shirts of the teams meeting at Stamford Bridge that day;...the same little rose.

And I remembered that it wasn't a rose.

It was a poppy.

Today we here in the U.S. will do our usual half-assed little remembrance of the end of the Great War. The day just doesn't seem to mean much to us; we call it "Veteran's Day", denaturing even the very name of the occasion into a sort of generic WinCo-label title, as if showing by our contrariness our indifference to the symbolism of the day and what it meant.

When you look for the difference between the "two nations separated by a common language" you can't really look much further than here.

In Great Britain the sports teams wear these little flowers, public officials and policemen, ordinary citizens, for weeks leading up to the two minutes of silence that fall on the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year. Bells will toll, soldiers and children march to the memorials and graves and lay their flowers down for the wind to riffle and carry off, silent messages to the dead men swallowed up by the unspeakable great dying.

Here we will wonder why the mail didn't come, and tsk with irritation that the bank and the passport office are closed.

I think I've said everything I need to say about the facile and meaningless "respect" we idly toss at uniforms without trying to understand what those uniforms mean. Instead let me quote the words of a man who believes in a hope and an eternity I do not:

"You all are thanking these men and women for doing things they wish they had never done.
You are thanking them for seeing things they wish they had never seen.
You are blessing them with a hell they wish they had never been part of."

We never seem to learn, do we? That "there never was a good war, or a bad peace."

Let us hope that some day we will.